


Til Touchdown Brings Me 'Round Again to Find

by returntosaturn



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Astronauts, F/M, Modern AU, Non magic AU, So..., here it is, my brain did a weird thing, space travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-15
Updated: 2017-01-15
Packaged: 2018-09-17 19:13:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9339158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/returntosaturn/pseuds/returntosaturn
Summary: “It’s been…much anticipated. It will be a long time away…but there’s much we want to learn. Contact we want to make. Bring home a better understanding of our universe…a bit of it’s meaning. This is…the singular most important mission I’ve ever been on. It will define everything.”She watched. It is the first time she had heard him admit it to himself, not a reporter’s microphone.“And yet it feels entirely ordinary,”// non-magic, modern AU (set in the 1960s)





	

_Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland, 1960s_

"Should we be here?" she hesitated, glancing around the hulking control panels and whirring machines for a view of the hallway.

"It's fine," he almost laughed, jabbing at the keypad habitually, with more than one finger, to press in the code.

The heavy locks gave way with a sigh of compressed air and he reached for her hand.

She followed him tediously down the sloping metal stairs to the floor, where the ship was gleaming like a overlarge jewel, metal glinting in the fluorescents.

"It's bigger from down here," she breathed, following him as he ran a hand along the unpainted underbelly. She had only seen it from the deck, through the plated windows. From there, it looked like just a souped up plane strapped to a gigantic bottle rocket. At this proximity, it was menacing. A slab of white and blue that extended to the tall ceiling of the bunker, overpowering in its solidity.

He smirked. “Like Earth. Smaller from out there…”

She ducked underneath, staring up into one of the jets, hollow and dark for now. Something stung in her chest, hot and sharp. 

She looked over, where he was inspecting the corrugation on the outer shell, taller than he usually seemed, in that shabby old suit they’d suggested he not wear for the entirety of America—perhaps the world—to view on their TV screens as he and his team discussed this great pledge of a mission to the Red Planet. From where she was standing, she couldn’t see the mop of auburn hair, presumably uncombed. Their public relations agents had been less than pleased to have America’s most noteworthy and applauded Astronaut arrive on campus to dozens of reporters dressed this way, but none said as much (to his face, she assumed). 

“The Leading Man,” she said into the jet, letting her own voice echo back down to her. “That’s what they called you. The most influential immigrant America has hosted since Albert Einstein.”

“Really, all that?” he scoffed, crouching to join her beneath the beast of metal and fiberglass.

She grinned wryly. She held her hands out at both sides, measuring the spanse of her arms compared to the girth of the hunk of machinery they stood under. She was but a twig compared.

“I think I’m ready to leave,” he said, and when she looked to him, he was stroking the underside of the ship like the belly of a dragon. She knew he was speaking to himself. “It’s been…much anticipated. It will be a long time away…but there’s much we want to learn. Contact we want to make. Bring home a better understanding of our universe…a bit of it’s meaning. This is…the singular most important mission I’ve ever been on. It will define everything.”

She watched. It is the first time she had heard him admit it to himself, not a reporter’s microphone.

“And yet it feels entirely ordinary,” he finished, dropping his hand and his eyes, watching the floor as they so often did.

“Because you’re ready.” Her voice quivered, and she blinked at the sound, not intending to have this conversation here. Not now. In a week, when it’s time to say goodbye…

He was close now, his eyes on her. His gaze was blazing blue like noon in springtime, seeing to her deepest parts. For all the fumbling and fidgeting he did around others, he was entirely too good at understanding her. At searching her.

"C-Can I kiss you?" His eyes flicker away and back to her, his jaw set.

She couldn’t determine if he was asking because she’d nearly gone to tears just now, or if he felt the distance of space already, as she did.

She inched forward, flat shoes silent on the concrete floors unlike all the feminine click-clack she'd heard all morning in the typists’ pool. 

"You don't have to keep asking me that every time." 

"Forgive me. It's proper."

She smirked.

She leaned up anyways, meeting him, tilting to a better angle. His hand journeyed a path through her hair, stroking at her neck.

Impossibly warm in this grey concrete room, caught in the taste of him, she could forget the colossal capsule he would be confined to for the next two and a half years. They very one they stood under now, looming like a great idol above their heads. She could forget that thirty-two months—or more—was such a very long time, during which a million things could happen. It was possible to even forget that time had not been so very kind to her over the past few years, and again it was taking from her the only person she’d found to trust. She could stop worrying about him _out there_ and just be here, just for now.

She pulled back, gripping with thumbs and forefingers at the collar of his pressed white shirt.

"Please come back," she admitted, forgetting that she was not supposed to feel this helpless and dizzy.

His hands found her wrists.

"I always have."

**//////**

**a year earlier**

She groaned, stretching her arms overhead, leaning away from the typewriter. She didn’t know how Elaine had managed it, in this office all alone before she’d been hired on. It was terribly mundane, slow work. Not anticipated when holding a position at NASA. Even an office job.

Tina had taken her officemate’s place for the time being, while she was out tending to her husband fresh from surgery. But even the temporary promotion wasn’t any more exciting than her actual job. She still answered phones, typed endlessly. Her only additional duty was keeping Graves’ schedule and greeting guests to the office—few and far between.

The door opened quietly. She had her back turned, filing a few things away in the rattling file cabinet behind her desk, but turned at the sound of feet shuffling on the carpet. A tall, gangling man stood before her desk, looking a bit adrift from beneath a mussed mop of hair. His suit was matched, but not carefully so, so that it almost looked comical and just slightly ill fitting. 

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Y-Yes, I’m looking for Director Graves. I had an appointment at ten o’clock.”

“Right. He’s just through there.” She pointed to Graves’ office door. 

“Thank you so much,” he answered, already heading to the far side of the outer office. He looked back to her, hand on the doorknob. He looked as if he’d like to ask something, peering hesitantly.

“You can go on in,” she encouraged, shrugging a shoulder and gesturing forward.

“Right. Sorry.” He let himself in noiselessly, glancing her way again in a double take.

It was only a short, commonplace introduction, but after a string of meetings spanning the next several weeks, she’d become familiar with this gangling stranger interrupting the monotonous quiet of the director’s office.

She’d been sat back at her normal desk, Elaine back from her leave, behind the nameplate that defined her as Assistant Secretary.

Therefore it was a complete surprise to have him approach her desk after sliding Graves’ door closed one morning.

She glanced up from her rapid typing, the room falling silent but for the slice of Elaine’s nail file an office-length away.

“Yes, sir?” she asked.

His cheeks pinked at that. “You’ve moved,” he observed, not meeting her eyes.

“Yes. I was only filling in…” She nodded briefly to Elaine who was peering over at them with horned spectacles, the beaded chain looped around them glinting the harsh light. She hummed suspiciously to herself, going back to her filing.

“I see,” he murmured.

He smiled at the carpet, flop of hair hanging into his eyes. Who was this guy, anyways? In all the visits he’d made, she’d never dared to ask. But if he was keen on hanging around…

“Can I help you with something?” she asked, ducking her head to try and catch his gaze.

“I hope so. Er…” He cleared his throat. “That is…I was wondering…I’m rather hungry. Would you care to…take lunch with me?”

She blanched, glancing from the mess of memos on her desk to Elaine who shrugged unenthused, back to the man before her who’s sky blue eyes were now trained intensely on her cheek.

“I…I’d like that.”

It beat the cafeteria, anyways.

-

“It isn’t what I really want to do, of course. I don’t know if anyone woke up one day when they were eight years old and decided they wanted to be a secretary,” she said around her pastrami sandwich.

“What do you want to do?” he asked, across the booth.

“I…was training at the police academy when I lived in New York City. But…I quit.” She set her sandwich down, poking idly at the straw in her iced tea.

“Why?” he asked. He was rather blunt for and Englishman, she’d discovered. Or perhaps he just didn’t understand what to say and when.

“My parents died,” she answered coolly. It was getting easier to talk about. A bit. Maybe to a stranger…

“Everything kind of fell apart when that happened…” She trailed off. It wasn’t easier. She blinked at the stinging sensation in her nose, turning to the window.

They’d passed quietly together after weeks of being ill, she and Queenie had argued, and she’d skipped her exams at the academy to leave town, not turning back for anything.

She just needed space. Time. To think. But space and time had turned into a six-month lease that turned into twelve and a job at the government’s prestigious and only aeronautics agency, because she couldn’t stand to go back to New York yet. She couldn’t face the sister she’d left red faced and crying behind the screen door, just weeks after their world had been shaken.

“I understand,” he said. She couldn’t decide if he meant it, or if he were trying to change the subject.

“I suppose I was the only one who actually became what they had wanted to be…when they grew up.” He was trying to be lighthearted, she realized, glancing back to him. He was smiling lopsidedly into his steaming mug of tea.

Something stirred in her chest. Something comfortable. She grinned.

“An Astronaut. What gave you the idea?”

“I was always outside watching for stars and things. I knew the constellations like old friends.” He smiled at her. Her heart fluttered again, and she tried to ignore it.

“The world is bigger than we can grasp.” His gaze was back to the table again, his fingers fiddling at the edge of the paper his sandwich had been wrapped in. “There’s infinite information flooding around us at every second. Perhaps if we understand it, learn about it, learn our place within it, we would make our cohabitation of this planet a little easier on ourselves. And each other.”

Her smile was tight. “That’s beautiful. And said like a true scientist.”

He huffed a laugh. 

She was over the moon.

**//////**

She didn’t see him the day he left. The evening prior was taken with traveling to the launch site and getting a good night’s sleep, so there was not so much as a phone call.

She wasn’t supposed to feel angry or hurt, so she vehemently decided against it. This was his job, and she had no right to be jealous of it. She knew what they were getting into, and if she had wanted to end things, she certainly would’ve before thirty months would transpire before she could.

Practical Porpentina was not supposed to have traveled from New York City to this farmland and get tangled in something like this. She had wanted to find herself. Find the thing she was meant for.

She couldn’t possibly conclude that this was it.

She was not a war wife waiting for the return of her long lost soldier. That was not her role. There was much too much work to be done in the meantime…

-

“Goldstein!” The com on her desk crackled with Director Graves’ sharp demand.

She jumped just a bit, and Irene yelped from her desk.

“Sir?” she asked, pressing the button down that allowed her to be heard on his end.

“Come in here.” He was softer, but not less loud. “Please.” 

She stood without signing off properly, and shuffled for the door to his inner office.

She let herself in. The afternoon sun was slanting long through the tall windows, setting a harsh sheen to Graves’ slicked hair.

“Yes?” she said to his back. His fingers were steepled at his chin, eyes closed like he were dozing off. At her voice, he sat up straighter, nearly glaring, pushing his chair around to face her.

“I have something to discuss with you. I wanted to be sure…that our current situation isn’t going to interfere with your work, Goldstein.”

“Current situation, sir? You mean…”

The team of men they’d just catapulted into the sky, through the atmosphere, and into the weightless unknown where they were out of reach and out of immediate contact. One particular man among them whom she’d had her eye on for quite awhile. She should’ve known it wouldn’t go unnoticed.

“Definitely not, sir.”

“As long as we’re clear,” he said, leaning back, desk chair groaning in protest. “I’m sure you’ve concluded by now that this is dangerous work. There’s numbers and calculations to fall back on, of course. But any number of things could happen that we on the ground have no control over. You understand?”

Tina swallowed. “Absolutely, sir,” she said evenly. It wasn’t her nature to begin ranting about having inner strength and all that. She’d rather prove it.

Graves nodded. “In any event, they’re on due course, everything perfect so far. Once they reach the planet, things are different. Our radio contact will be even more sparse; even more delayed. That’s when we worry about things going wrong. Luckily they’re a good team and are well versed in problem solving.”

“I understand.”

“Good.” His eyes flicked for the door, and Tina took this as her cue to leave.

“And Goldstein…”

She turned. 

“I’ll see that you’re placed on the list of emergency contacts for Mr. Scamander. In the event…” He gave his hand a wave, a collective gesture.

She nodded once more. “Thank you, sir.”

-

Her life had become an endless streak of tossing between restlessness and calm. An everlasting eye of a hurricane that began and ended with the roar of shuttle engines and a grey ribbon over the sky. 

It was not so hard. Except the bit where it was. Rather like losing her parents. There were times she thought about them—and him—for most of the day, wishing they were still present, at least somewhere. Then there was a quiet sort of a forgetfulness when she’d realize she hadn’t given them thought in quite awhile. Something would spark it, she was never sure what. But then the pining and memories wouldn’t leave her be. When days were long and holidays came and went. When she let work get the better of her, and evenings by herself were spent in quiet with no companion but a book. But Newt was not deceased, though for figurative intents and purposes, he might’ve been. This was the key difference. He existed, somewhere on some plane, even if not her own.

Of course she had known that the world would change without him. But once Queenie had announced her pregnancy and birthed the baby in the expanse of time since there’d been any news of him or the team, Tina felt completely swallowed.

She had not grown so close to him in the time they'd had to think that there was anything particularly extraordinary about them. Or at least it was easier to believe now, in his absence, that there hadn't been. But he…he was extraordinary. And that was what got her. He was what she’d found to light her days after so much time spent searching. She was kidding herself to think otherwise, even if she forced it. And now she was waiting for just the mumble of his voice captured in a radio wave. 

She had not forgotten that life was a cruel thing that could topple the steeple you'd built to your future in a second's notice.

She couldn’t cling to it any closer than practicality called for. The world would turn as it always had, measured by miles and sunsets and parsecs. It would turn in her favor or not. In the meantime, there were relationships to mend.

She returned to New York for a brief vacation, to help her sister with the new baby. Of course Queenie, intuition sharp as a tack, had sensed something off. So she’d been forced to spill the entire story, after which Queenie considered that perhaps her waiting wasn’t all bad.

(“After all, you’re here, aren’t you?”)

And she’d even suggested that if once he returned, if things did not feel the same, perhaps it was enough that he’d shown Tina that the world could still be kind, at least for a moment.

She busied herself with tending to her new nephew and helping Queenie manage while Jacob was at work during the day, spending dinners with them and finding herself laughing out loud, as in old times. Finally she felt at least a sliver of a sense of normalcy.

The phone rang one afternoon when she’d finally gotten everything quiet, baby and Queenie both napping peacefully.

She grabbed the receiver where it hung on the wall in the kitchen, baby in one arm.

She held it against her shoulder. "Kowalski residence."

"Tina," the male voice on the other end said curtly.

"Mr. Graves. Hello, sir..."

"I am calling to let you know," he said, straight to the chase as always, "we just made radio contact with Traveler Seven. They're set to land here in two weeks."

Tina felt a vacuum constrict in her chest. 

"Two weeks? That's earlier than..."

"Yes. Well as much as I can reveal to you...the mission went exceptionally well and, for lack of a better phrase, the planets have aligned in their favor. We will have to bring them home now or wait another eighteen months. And we wouldn't want that, would we?"

She didn't miss Graves' tone.

"No sir."

"When can I expect you home?" he said, matter-of-fact all over again.

"Two weeks, sir."

"Right." The line clicked dead without a goodbye. 

She replaced the receiver, shuffled her nephew into a more comfortable position in her arms, and smiled down at him, stroking a finger along his plump cheeks. 

Normalcy, indeed.

\- 

There was no running towards him, throwing her arms around him, as is in all the sodden romance novels. 

His team landed in the Pacific Ocean, and then there was a flight home, a sea of reporters to wade through. She caught a glimpse of his weary face on television during her lunch break. Eyes hooded, hair overgrown in its self-sheared mess. She wished she could just pop over and grab his hand and lead him away from all of them, into the quiet that he needed.

On Monday the phone at her desk rang, and she was fully prepared to beat off another journalist looking for an interview with Director Graves, but Newt’s own graveled voice answered her sharp salutation.

“I’d like it very much…if you came to my house this evening.”

“I can bring dinner,” she said almost hurriedly.

“Yes, please.”

And so she ended up lounging on the hood of his outdated car under a cobalt-purple sunset eating the same diner sandwiches they’d had during their first lunch together, and reposing in comfortable silence.

He seemed far away. He’d barely uttered a sentence since she’d arrived…after he held her and breathed against her hair for well over a minute in his tiny foyer. Tina didn’t mind. She understood. 

“There’s something I need to tell you…” She broke the silence, already regretting what she’d have to say. She watched the muscle in his jaw twitch where he was laying on his side along the hood beside her, face turned away. He was already speculating…

“I’m moving back to New York City. I…spent some time with my sister and…I think it might be time to start over at the police academy.”

“Oh,” he answered, keeping his facial expression even though the flutter of his lashes gave him away. “That’s wonderful. Truly.”

“Are you…upset?”

His hand moved to cover hers, squeezing. “I could never be upset with you, Tina. Especially not for something like that.”

There was a long stretch of silence, wherein Tina really didn’t know what to say next. She’d only just made the decision when she arrived back in Maryland, spending all her time on the plane thinking it over. Of course she’d choose to leave now that he’d returned, but if the two and a half years had taught her anything, it was that waiting on herself wasn’t an option.

He shifted, reaching for his pocket, tugging out a little drawstring pouch. He held it out to her. “I brought you something.”

Inside, there was the tiniest pebble, remarkably ordinary brown, jagged and rough all over, just like any rock she’d seen before. But she knew the journey this one had traveled.

“It’s a hard place...” he reminisced. “Dry, and harsh. But it’s beautiful in its own way.”

Tina held the stone in her palm reverently, but found she had to turn away, blinking against tears.

She sniffed. “You’re…really remarkable, you know?”

Fingers played at the ends of her hair, and when she looked down on him, dim sunlight illuminating his features in sharp relief, he shook his head.

He pulled her in, a moon to its home, an orbit that phased but never changed, and set his lips to hers as the sun lowered below the horizon and the sky turned plum.

-

They kept in touch between letters and phone calls. She saved the letters, and eagerly accepted the long distance charges from the operator every time, without exception.

She finished her training, and took charge of a beat in the Bronx. He mentioned visiting her sometime soon. And one evening, when she was tucked under her quilt with the cord of the phone drooping from the nightstand, to the carpet, over the sheets, she listened to him talk about retiring…moving on to something different. What that life might be like. They fantasize and romanticize about that future until midnight.

"Maybe teaching..."

"NYU is great," she told him, at least a little hopeful.

She could practically hear his smile. "I already have a meeting set there in July."

-

She saw him a distance away, navigating a crowd, a battered brown suitcase at his side.

His pace didn't quicken, her heart didn't try to pry its way through her throat. They just met as any pair at any other airport would, his head ducking, her hands in her pockets.

He smiled at her in her severe blue uniform, a little quirk of his lips. 

She escorted him to a taxi, chatting along the way, asking about his flight, if he was hungry.

When they fell into a sleepy silence in the cab, his hand reached to cover hers on the space between their seats.

She had never felt more a part of this earth, more near to its core, more atune to what the radio waves and light waves and whirring machines were all trying to say in their own way. 

She felt still.

**Author's Note:**

> Soon....this was fueled by a lot of Bob Dylan and an insatiable need for knowledge about NASA and the space race...After I'd written and edited, it seemed a bit short on word count, but I liked it the way it came out, so I didn't feel the need to add more, and while I could've made a multi-chapter story out of this, I simply don't have the time. Also, I fictionalized the mission to Mars, obviously, to make things a bit more interesting and Newt's travel there a bit longer. All in all, I hope you enjoyed this weird little journey.
> 
> ( tumblr: @allscissorsallpaper )


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